Description:

The challenges to peace following civil conflicts are many. Following peaceful negotiations to end the conflict, the state’s goal is to regain its monopoly over the use of violence within its borders. This requires the rebel groups to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate (DDR) back into society, leaving them vulnerable to renewed violence by the state. The government can attempt to reduce the severity of this credible commitment problem by including power-sharing mechanism in the peace agreement. One such power-sharing mechanism is the integration of rebel fighters into the national military. I argue that this military integration provides the disarming group the ability to provide their own security as well as sanction the government if it fails to hold up its side of the agreement, thereby reducing the chance of agreement failure. A popular alternative to address the problem is the use of peacekeepers to provide security and improve the government’s credible commitment. As I show in this study, the involvement of peacekeepers brings its own challenges and problems, negatively affecting the credible commitment and durable peace. This study combines a quantitative analysis of military integration provisions with a two-by-two qualitative case comparison. Using the unique dataset that I created based on the UCDP Peace Agreement Dataset (Harbom et al. 2006, Högbladh 2012), I found that military integration of rebel fighters was just as successful, if not more so, than deploying peacekeepers; and, it was more effective than just performing DDR alone. Performing both a cross-case and within-case comparison of military integration and peacekeeping, I found that the challenges to third party interventions, especially peacekeepers, can delay the onset of a durable peace. Power-sharing reduces the chance of agreement failure, but providing an effective security mechanism in addition to addressing the grievances is both necessary and sufficient to achieve a durable peace.